Security was always a problem. Talifer was never mentioned in the newspapers. It had no public existence. This concern with security seemed to inhibit life at every level. One Saturday afternoon Betsey was watching television. Coverly had taken Binxey for a trip to the shopping center. Out of her window she saw that Mr. Hansen, who lived across the street, was taking down his storm windows and putting up his screens. He had a stepladder, which he planted carefully in his flowerbeds, then he raised and unhooked his windows and carried them into the garage. His wife and children seemed to be off. There were no other signs of life around the place. When he had removed the windows from the first floor he started on the upstairs bedrooms. His ladder didn’t reach these and he had to work by leaning out of the open windows, unhooking the frames and drawing them on their rectilinear bias into the house. The hardware for one of the windows seemed warped or rusted. It would not come loose. He straddled the windowsill and yanked at the frame. He fell out of the window and landed with a thud onto a little terrace that he had paved with cement block a few weeks earlier. Betsey looked out of the window long enough to see that his body was inert. Then she returned to her television set. Twenty minutes later she heard a siren and an ambulance came down the street and took the still inert form away on a stretcher. She learned that evening that he had been instantly killed. Some children had given the alarm. But why hadn’t she? How could she account for her unnatural behavior? The general concern for security seemed to be at the bottom of her negligence. She had not wanted to do anything that would call attention to herself, that would involve giving testimony or answering questions. Presumably her concern for security had led her to overlook the death of a neighbor.
Coverly would have had some difficulty explaining to Leander that while he had been trained as a taper and sub-programmer, he had been switched to public relations when he was transferred from the Remsen to the Talifer Site. This was a mistake, made by one of the computations machines in personnel, but there was no appeal. They lived in a mixed neighborhood. Betsey wanted a shelter and Coverly had applied for a transfer to another neighborhood but the government-operated real-estate office was swamped with such applications and anyhow Coverly was not unhappy where he was. Ginkgo trees had been planted along the sidewalks where children roller-skated, and song birds had nested in the trees. Sitting in his back yard before dinner he could watch the sere and moving mountain twilight—that sour and powerful glow—beyond the distant gantries. They had a little garden and a grill for cooking meat. The house on their right was owned by a man named Armstrong, who was in the World Relations Department. Armstrong had developed a dry, manly and monosyllabic prose style for ghosting the chronicles of astronauts. The house on their left was owned by a gantry-crew man named Murphy, who got drunk and beat up his wife on Saturday nights. The Wapshots did not get along with the Murphys. One morning when Coverly was at work the signal board indicated that there was a telephone call for him. He left the security area to take the call. It was Betsey. “She stole my garbage pail,” Betsey said.
“I don’t understand, sugar,” Coverly said.
“Mrs. Murphy,” Betsey said. “The garbage man came this morning, he always comes on Tuesdays, and when he took away the garbage she took that nice, new, tin, galvanized garbage pail of mine and carried it right up to the back of her house, leaving me with that cracked, plastic old thing they brought from Canaveral.”
“Well, I can’t do anything about it now,” Coverly said. “I’ll be home at half-past five.”
Betsey was still excited when he returned. “You go right over there now and get it back,” she said. “They’ll fill it up with garbage and claim that it’s theirs. You should have painted our name on it. You go right over there now and get it away from them. There he is, he’s cutting the grass.”
